“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” Philip Larkin’s biting ape of a nursery rhyme’s bouncing rhythms might constitute something of a manifesto for horror movies. Trauma has long been a foundation of the genre, and in the last few years has really taken centre stage. One might note the vogue for Ringu-esque curses transferred from person to person, as seen in It Follows or Smile. Or, one might recall (as I constantly do) the inability of Jamie Lee Curtis to go thirty seconds on the latest Halloween press tour without saying “trauma” (pronounced “trow-mah”).
But, especially since the success of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, it seems there has also been a particular focus on the generational kinds of trauma – on the dangers of…well, heredity. Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All sits firmly, if weirdly, in that lineage.
We follow Maren (Taylor Russell), a teenager in 1980s Virginia who, after behaving badly at a sleepover, goes on the run. Alone in the world, she resolves to find her absentee mother, Janelle, and starts taking greyhounds across the midwest, bound for Minnesota. During the course of her journey she meets various oddballs and creeps. She also meets Lee, played by (be still our beating hearts) Timothée Chalamet. In the endless American spaces between gas stations, diners, and cornfields, the two fall in love, eventually attempting to build a life together.
Charming right? A rust-belt, Reagan-era, Call Me By Your Name? Not exactly.
You see, Maren and Lee are cannibals. On some abstract, academic level, I knew this when I sat down in the theatre, but I was nonetheless entirely unprepared for Timmy Shimmy, on all-fours, absolutely chowing down human flesh.
Yes, Bones and All is a gruesome film, stomach-churning and frequently disturbing, but its violent moments and incarnadine scenes are illustrative rather than the constitutive of the point. It is not about making us voyeurs to bloodletting, it is about living marginally, the things we inherit from our parents, and the monsters which these can make of us.
Cannibalism is both the ultimate metaphor for and model of otherness. It is repulsive and destabilising, and for that (absolutely fair) reason, profoundly isolating. The paradoxical result of this is that ‘eaters’ (to use the proper parlance) come across one another disproportionately often – quite literally sniffing each other out. For the same reason, we also encounter very few characters who are not ‘eaters’ and essentially zero who are not victims. So, other people flash by for Maren and Lee as threats and food.
The physical world – scarcely changing across thousands of miles – is likewise removed from the pair. The crumbling clapperboards, the bungalows and the rusting pick-ups, the stagnant creeks and the drooping trees, the asphalt and the fields (viewed from behind a windshield), all suggest a guardedness. Lee and Maren’s America holds them at arm’s length. It withholds from them a defined sense of place, and thereby a possibility of home.
Guadagnino knows how to tell a love story though, and the shared otherness of his protagonists makes the film’s romantic element entirely convincing: there really is no one for them but each other. Tellingly, the song which plays at the close of Bones and All, written for the film by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is titled (You Made It Feel Like) Home. And the lyric which recurs, all yearning exhalations, is “for a minute / just a minute”. In a deep way, the story told is one of apartness, and what it means to be together in apartness.
Another key plot element which can be divulged without spoiling anything is that cannibalism, the need to consume, appears to be an inherited characteristic. Nobody says this explicitly, but both Maren’s mother and Lee’s father had the bug. And, as they say, what are the odds…?
The births of Maren and Lee therefore take place under sentence, with the sins of the father determined as those of the son’s (and ditto for the mother). We know that violence is frequently learned through domestic modelling, and in Bones and All, implication directs the viewer towards some nebulous combination of nature and nurture. Again, the film’s cannibalistic conceit is both metaphor and model, only in this case for various forms of family trauma.
Furthermore, this terrible bestowal is progressive. The urge to eat only grows stronger with time and, by extension, age. The destiny of Maren and Lee then is to become more like their monstrous parents. That very human horror (“I’m becoming my dad!”) is in this case rendered as actual horror. Russell and Chalamet are obviously young actors, but other supporting characters open that window to the future.
The first comrade encountered by Maren is called Sully. This approaching-OAP ‘eater’ is all wrinkles, twisted smiles, and spit bubbles. He dresses like a fisherman and sports a greasy pony-tail. I will also say that almost every single phrase, even word, out his mouth induces a kind of creeping nausea. Sully, brilliantly played by Mark Rylance, manages to be both infantile and aged, tender and spiteful, doddering and violent, a khaki vest stuffed with human foibles, all so exaggerated and misshapen as to become terrifying.
Later, Lee and Maren spend an evening drinking lakeside with two other middle-aged ‘eaters’, Jake and Brad. As the camera traces these men, their faces constantly remoulded by the flicker cast off the campfire, they each become something primal – teeth filed into points, limp stringy hair, and constant looks of hunger.
Jake is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, another Guadagnino veteran; you might remember him as Elio’s father in Call Me By Your Name. One feels a deep discomfort in watching Stuhlbarg share cannibal life advice with Chalamet, as it becomes ghastly parody of the scene in which Mr. Perlman comforts his heartbroken son.
In all three instances, (and in the brief case of Maren’s mother) the ‘eaters’ have done enough, have committed enough, that they seem to have relinquished some essential grasp on personhood. Or, perhaps, cut-off for long enough from society they now themselves travesty, rather than inhabit, humanity. At any rate, it is clear that some combination of trauma, abject isolation, and ravaging time, has created cautionary monsters.
What I appreciated most about Bones and All was its sincerity. The film took its cannibalism just as seriously as it took its love story. To simultaneously hold before the lens two things which seem (and almost certainly are) in contradiction requires a genuine artistic bravery. Timothée Chalamet naturally deserves similar praise – to be possibly the biggest movie star in the world and still go in search of the outsider character is a rare thing.
This, however, ends up presenting an unavoidable and insurmountable difficulty for the film, a problem without a solution. For the audience, there is an implicit tension between the unique shininess of Chalamet’s star and the dark vacuum of Lee. In a sense, Chalamet is too big for the narrow fictional world which he is trying to inhabit. Following the dictum of showing rather than telling, it might be worth remembering that the Milan premiere of Bones and All was shut down by police after his fans almost stormed the place.
Technically and creatively, Bones and All is in safe hands. After all, Guadagnino is an auteur; defined here as being bearded and generally looking like Raputin. And the performances are wonderful. Watching Taylor Russell thaw provides one of the film’s few moments of sunlight – for a little while one can even forget her dietary habits. Chalamet is also great, bringing to this role what he does to all his roles: >15% of Hamlet.
To be honest, I am still unsure how much I liked the film, whether I liked the film. I have never acquired the taste (as it were) for horror, and a large part of me rebels at using the word “enjoyed” in relation to cannibalism. Perhaps the right word is “memorable”, perhaps it is “weird”, perhaps some combination thereof – “wemorable”?
At any rate, in our cinematic mainstream bleached like coral by the depredations of the superhero franchise, there is something bracing about a film so seriously weird and serious in its weirdness.